October 2009 Blog Posts

If you're wondering about the differing fonts between quick throw-away posts and multi-paragraph posts, It's because I'm now using OneNote to draft my longer pieces and I haven't quite figured out an easy way to integrate fonts.
I'll fix it soon, now, move along!

You may have noticed I have a passing interest in the subject of religion. You may also have noticed I have a penchant for biology, especially evolutionary biology. Which got me to thinking...
I'm currently watching my way through Last Chance To See, a TV reprise of the 1990 book of the same name, starring Mark Carwardine and Stephen Fry. The aim of the series is to revisit some of the world's rarest and most endangered species, an audacious aim given that these reclusive and solitary species are down to tiny numbers of wild specimens. Much of the series has already...

Oh, Albert. That last paragraph has just earned you a coveted place in my "Raging Fucking Nutbags" Tweetdeck column, because let's face it, that 's a *really* stupid thing to say.
In fact, evolutionary theory predicts and demands compassionate behaviour in social species. Allow me to explain.
Your strawman of evolution, that the strongest survive, that there's no call to altruism and that "might is right" might be correct, if only we were an entirely solitary species. In your cartoon version of evolution, we're all meandering through life entirely alone, just looking for things to eat and things to fuck, and our...

From the maniacal gloating department comes this:
From the front page of the Jesus: All About Life campaign.
As they say on the internets: FAIL.
Update: from examining the stack trace, we can see the developer of at least part of the site was "Rod". Hi Rod. Are you proud of this one? Information disclosure FTL. Also, it looks like JAAL are cheaping it up on shared hosting on a machine called HSTPRDWEB01, co-located at perthix.net hosting. I almost certainly have more processing power running this blog than the entire JAAL campaign does. JAAL shares its IP address with, among others, RedRooster.com.au,...

As some of you rabble may be aware, next year sees the "Rise Of Atheism" convention in Melbourne, Australia. This is a global-level convention featuring the likes of Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers as speakers, and is expected to see thousands of non-believers descend on Melbourne in a godless frenzy of spending and debauchery*.
The AFA, not unexpectedly, has applied to the Victorian Government for funding assistance, and seeing as this event will be bringing a significant amount of dollars to Melbourne, some response was expected.
Nothing so far but the chirping of crickets
Meanwhile, Melbourne is hosting something called "The World Parliament...

The Australian Anti Vaccination Network put an interesting poll up on their site last night. They asked (in a somewhat naive manner):
Will you be getting the swine flu (AH1N1 2009) vaccine?
With the options
Yes
No
I already have
I'm not sure, I need to do more research first
I'm sure you can guess how this turned out once Twitter was alerted to the poll's existence?
My spies tell me that Meryl and her cronies had no idea how it was done until earlier today when...

Yes, Myself and good mate James Taylor decided, over a couple of glasses of wine and some rousing choruses of "Creep", "Light at the End of the Tunnel" and "When I'm Cleaning Windows", to start a meetup group here in Sydney for those interested in:
Drinking a beer or two
Playing songs on ukulele
Having a laugh
To join, you must fulfill at least two, preferably three of the above criteria and join the Facebook Group "Sydney Ukulele 'n' Beers Meetup".
We're currently in the process of finding a venue for the...